Category: Uncategorized

Some books I’m reading right now:

• Trust-Based Selling by Charles Green
• Why You Lose at Bridge by SJ Simon
• George Whitefield and the Great Awakening by John Pollock
• The Emo Programmer by Kathy Sierra and David Heinemeier Hansson
• Memorandum on the Subject of Social and Official Intercourse between European Officers and Indians
• 109 Ideas for Virtual Learning by Judy Breck
• The Two Minute Rule by Robert Crais
• The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin
• Don Bradman’s Book by Don Bradman
• Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez

For most of the titles, it’s second time around. I like savouring things. The British Empire “confidential” pamphlet is intriguing, and I will be posting about it later.

…dream a little dream of me….

Mamas and Papas (or Satchmo, if you prefer his sandpaper). And thank you W.Schwant /F.Andre/G.Kahn whoever you may be.

I was trying to work out a post title for DRM and then decided not to, too schmaltzy. But Mama Cass’s voice meant I kept the song reference in.

This has been a confusing week for me as I watch events unfold in the DRM space. Take a look at this, which came to me courtesy Charlie Wood at Spanning, the Moonwatcher.

Let me get this right: Windows RSS Platform to ship without secure feed support. And that goes for all of IE7? No way to get anything RSS other than vanilla news. No Hotmail, no Amazon, no eBay. No authentication support at all?

Mmmhm. Don’t understand. Maybe it’s because my head was still buzzing with the iTunes stuff.

I’m still getting over the French decision re Apple and iTunes. I am no fan of DRM per se, but I needed to get my head around the decision.

Today you can buy any-format music and get it to play on an iPod.

Today you can manage any-format music regardless of origin via iTunes.

But IF you buy music from iTunes (which you don’t have to do) THEN you can only buy it in AAC format and FairPlay-protected and so on.

And the French have refused that constraint. And we may not have iTunes in France. I guess that’s like saying we don’t have internet gambling in the US. Well, fine.

The decision is interesting, because I want everything to be DRM free, yet have this nagging feeling that what was decided makes no sense.

Let me try this on pens, something physical. Let’s make a Parker pen an iPod. Just humour me, please. Let’s assume Parker pens outsell all other fountain pens, that they created the category and zoomed into world domination mode.

Then they made sure you could buy ink from anywhere, not just Parker ink, and put it into your Parker pen. So people were freer about how they used their pens.

Then let’s assume that you had a pen maintenance kit that came with the pen. Dropper, nib cleaner, blotter, whatever. And again Parker outsold everything else. And they made sure that you could use the pen maintenance kit for pens other than Parker.

And let’s assume you had Parker shops. But they only sold Parker pens and Parker ink and Parker everything.

Because that’s what it was, a Parker shop. End of allegory.

Maybe the French are right. But right now I think we have bigger issues to resolve re DRM than this.

Thanks to Doc Searls for pointing me towards this FactoryJoe post. Fantastic stuff. And if that gets me labelled even more Utopian, tough.

I particularly like:

Think about it this way: if the water that’s piped into your house had DRM on it and only allowed you to use it for showers, how would you wash your clothes? If you were only allowed to make ice cubes, how would you make iced tea? If you had to pay $0.99 everytime you wanted a glass of water?

The whole lot of proprietary infrastructure needs to be open sourced and given back to people. To people over companies. To those who believe in self-determination.

This is not tree-hugger stuff. Markets are consumerising and market participants are gaining further self-determinism than was previously possible. And it changes everything.

And the post continues:

Listen, here’s what’s at stake:

Ideas and hope need to flow like water if a civilization is to continue its ascension toward greatness. Impediments to that flow will stall growth. Fortunately, like a solvent, the culture of open source will continue to expand, will wear away at these impediments, to restore the natural flow of social capital, of ideas, of hope. Those who get this first will rise, and rise quickly.

Don’t think that the owners of the 21st century have been preselected.

There’s a lot of snowballs in that, Doc.

It’s that Saturday feeling.

Funny days in the park
Every day’s the fourth of july
People reaching, people touching
A real celebration
Waiting for us all
If we want it, really want it

From Saturday in the Park by Chicago

I just love the emotion expressed in  “every day’s the fourth of july”, an innate need to enjoy the freedoms we have bestowed upon us. And I love Chicago’s music.

I see the Encyclopedia Britannica’s finally decided to come out fighting, and have challenged Nature’s research on the accuracy of Britannica versus Wikipedia.

I am reminded of a story in one of Po Bronson’s earliest books, Bombardiers. [And by the way, please do read Bronson. If you’ve worked in the City or the Street, take a look at this]

I’m paraphrasing Bronson, but somewhere in the book he points out that in the Stone Age, Might was Right, and you could work out who was Mighty; in the Industrial Age, it became Money Ruled, and you could work out who was the Man; now, in the Information Age, we have a problem. Information often changes faster than the time it takes to verify its accuracy. So hunches are important.

Please remember this is a paraphrase years after reading the book; any inaccuracies are mine and not Po’s. And by the way I’ve decided to link to him as well, keep in touch with what he’s doing.

What’s this got to do with Wikipedia and Britannica? This is the way I look at it. The Big Endians and Little Endians will have their Blefuscudian battles forever. But if we step outside the study, and look at the biggest stories we’ve had on inaccuracies and changes in Wikipedia: John Siegenthaler; Tom Harkin; Norm Coleman; Tom Coburn; they’ve all had one thing in common:

Politicians.

Go figure. We will always have both Wisdom as well as Madness when we deal with Crowds. And we will have Politics, where the two meet.

I was reading The Park Paradigm this morning, noting Sean’s “obligatory” post/comment on Google Finance. In it he refers to an external post from Internet Outsider, which makes the point that Google Finance works better than Yahoo Finance because it concentrates on content aggregation rather than content production.

And this made me think of blogs again, and an old observation of mine:  There are three types of blogs:

• Thinkers, where there is a lot of original content created
• Linkers, where there is a lot of original content pointed to
• Stinkers, where neither of these takes place

I sense there is a “right” thinker-linker ratio which will aid and catalyse co-creation of content through comment and “snowballing”. Too much T and it’s all too theoretical. Too much L and it’s a news service. And there’s never a good reason for any S.

Any thoughts or experiences out there? What makes you read a blog? What makes you go back? What makes you link?